Just a third of Americans can pass a multiple choice “U.S. Citizenship Test,” fumbling over such simple questions as the cause of the Cold War or naming just one thing Benjamin Franklin is famous for.

And of Americans 45 and younger, the passing rate is a tiny 19 percent, according to a survey done for the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

Worse: The actual test only requires that 60 percent of the answers be correct. In the survey, just 36 percent passed.

Magic dirt, LOL.

Telling, with the poorer than the already horrendous norm scores from the young people, given the late demographic shift. And, as to the norm, given a Constitutional Posterity definition of “citizens, the third statistic may actually be about right.

For reasons all my own, I have devised a beta-version test of what I call “basic” American civic knowledge. It needs work; initial norming indicates that most US law school professors could not pass it. We’ll see how the Posterity performs sooner or later.